Angular 2, the long-awaited rewrite of the popular JavaScript framework, is finally going live Thursday evening, Google said on Wednesday afternoon. The moves follows a beta release stage last December and a release candidate first offered in May.

With the final release, Google is offering a framework optimized for small payload size and performance, said Jules Kremer, technical program manager for Angular at the company. "With ahead-of-time compilation and built-in lazy loading, we've made sure that you can deploy the fastest, smallest applications applications across the browser, desktop, and mobile environments."

Modular Angular 2 enables developers to use a third-party library or write their own. The upgrade features the Angular CLI command-line interface, along with more capable versions of Angular's router, forms, and core APIs.

Next up for Angular are bug fixes and nonbreaking features for APIs marked as stable, more guides and live examples of specific to use cases, and more work on animations. Web Workers, for web content to run scripts in background threads, will be moved out of an experimental phase, and Angular Material 2, providing Material Design components, will be added as well. More features and languages will be added to Angular Universal, which provides server-side rendering for apps, and speed and payload size improvements also are planned.

Also known as AngularJS, the framework debuted six years ago, boasting dependency injection and HTML-driven development. It was rewritten to allow for a decoupling of the framework from the DOM, enabling use of multiple renderers; Microsoft's TypeScript, a typed superset of JavaScript, was used in the rewrite.

This story, "Google's Angular 2 JavaScript framework finally arrives" was originally published by
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